In 1999, I happened to pick up a book in the local library
documenting the photographic evidence of the JFK
assassination. Looking through its pages, I realised that many of the
photographs and film frames were blurred—usually
because the person taking the photograph or film moved during the exposure. It
got me thinking about how such blurring might be removed using computers.

I was actually surprised, at first, that this had not already
been done. I was aware that there had been some deblurring work done on the
early images from the flawed Hubble Space Telescope (before it was repaired),
and thought that images as important to the historical record as the JFK
assassination would surely have been subjected to the best algorithms that
scientists could muster. But the evidence was there, in front of my eyes, that
this had apparently not been done.

Ideas for performing such “deblurring” swirled around in my head.
I knew all about Fourier theory and deconvolution, both from my Electrical
Engineering training as well as my work in Physics. But I also knew that
Fourier techniques were limited, and tended to introduce artefacts that were
visually distracting. So I concentrated on methods that could be applied
directly in image space, rather than Fourier space.

By 2000, some of these ideas were itching to be tried out. I had
done some research on deconvolution and deblurring algorithms available
generally on the Internet, and found that neither were in great abundance; this
explained why no one seemed to have deblurred the photographic evidence of the
JFK assassination. There were hints that such methods had been used in military
applications, but, understandably, the trail often “went cold”—what there was of it in public view.

I worked on these algorithms, on and off, during 2000. By early
2001 I had a workable program, and by early September of that year I had improved
it substantially. I believe that the results obtained by the program are as
good as are likely to be achieved by any general deblurring algorithm.

I wrote the software in a fairly flexible way, to allow me to
expand it in the future. The input and output files for the program are
actually in a plain text format, which allows images of arbitrary
dimensionality, and accuracy, to be specified. (Apart from the obvious image
processing applications, I also had in mind, for instance, three-dimensional medical
scanning.)

In practice, however, the application of the algorithm to
photographic images gathered the most attention. During 2001 I applied the
program to frames of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, and was making
good progress, even though the highest-quality digital scans of the film, made
in the late 1990s, were not available to researchers. Towards the end of 2001,
however, I became aware of a large body of JFK researchers who believed that
the Zapruder film was, in fact, a fabrication. This had grave ramifications for
my deblurring work, of course, both because the deblurring of a fraudulent film
would be of little intrinsic value, and also because the blurring characteristics
of such a film may not be completely self-consistent, depending on how the
fabrication had been carried out.

During 2002, I investigated a large number of the claims that had
been put forward about the photographic evidence, stretching my physics,
engineering and computing skills to the limit. I have found that, although some
apparent indications of forgery have turned out, on closer examination, to be
mistaken (or at least not proved), there are a substantial number of
inconsistencies and impossibilities that lead me to conclude that the
photographic evidence has, in fact, been altered. Moreover, when one looks at
the broader issue of the totality of evidence, including the medical evidence
in particular, it is clear that what is seen in the extant photographic
evidence is inconsistent with what occurred in DealeyPlaza on that day in 1963.
I am in the process of summarising these findings,
in preparation for a conference in May 2003.

This, together with other commitments, has led me to postpone any
further work on the UnBlur program. However, the program is fully operational,
in its current form, and can be downloaded and used free of charge. It is,
unfortunately, still quite difficult to “drive”; a fully simplified
Windows-based version of it, for simple image deblurring, would be a nice
project for the future.

The following pages provide a guide to downloading and running
the UnBlur program, including an introductory tutorial. Unfortunately, I am not
in a position to support the program, so it is simply available to use on an
“as is” basis, although I am happy to answer simple questions by email (please
do not send images or files).